Jack Cobbler’s Fall.

Tim Cooper 

In August 1828, John Stevens was part of a team of men charged with the ‘knocking’, or closure, of the famed Pednandrea mine in Redruth. Today, long after the closure of Cornwall’s last mine in 1998, it is easy to think of closure as an act of finality: a traumatic moment of exhaustion, decay, and loss. Yet, even in the heyday of Cornwall’s copper mining boom, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of individual mines waxed and waned. Catherine Mills has described Cornwall’s mining industry as characterized by a ‘distinctive pattern of alternating periods of activity and idleness’, and individual mines may have gone through innumerable such phases in their already remarkably long lives. Pednandrea, which burrowed its way under the heart of Redruth town, was reputed to have a nearly two-hundred-year-old history of operation in 1828.

Nonetheless, that August Pednandrea was marked for a period of rest, and John Stevens and his associates had been given the task of ‘sollaring’ over one of the main access shafts to the mine. Perhaps all these men gathered hoping that their work would prove just a temporary installation before new adventurers could take on the enterprise. Stevens, who the Western Times reported as generally known by his nickname, Jack Cobbler, had just finished covering the shaft opening with planks when the piece of timber that supported the sollar gave way. He immediately tumbled headlong into fathoms of darkness below, almost taking his colleague, William Thomas, with him. Thomas, it was reported, only escaped the same horrifying end by the completely improbable miracle of clinging to “the sides of one of the angles of the shaft”. He was rescued by his friends. Years later, a reporter for the Royal Cornwall Gazette wrote that after his recovery Thomas had been struck by a paroxysm of terror and then ‘ran wildly away, apparently not knowing whither, and at length he was found in a pig’s house, where proper means were had recourse to, to recover him.’ 

Stevens’s fall was a terrible, but sadly not uncommon, end for a miner. Despite earnest searches, Stevens could not be found in the rapidly flooding workings below and eventually Pednandrea was closed-up with his body still unrecovered. Yet this terrible end for the man Stevens was also the beginning of a strange afterlife for the man Jack Cobbler. For twenty-six years Cobbler’s body lay in the fatal shaft. However, in 1854 a new company was formed to rework the mine. After draining, Cobbler’s body, was, as widely expected, rediscovered; described somewhat prosaically at the subsequent inquest as ‘lying on its left side, at the bottom of the 32nd fathom (192 feet) level.’ At a moment when the Cornish mining industry was reaching its final peak of production, raising over 200,000 tons of ore annually, the discovery prompted enormous interest in Redruth. The Cornish Telegraph reported that, ‘so great was the excitement produced by the discovery of his remains after so long a period that his funeral was followed by about four thousand persons.’ 

Something about Cobbler’s story clearly caught the imagination of this mining community. Perhaps the sudden return of this son of Redruth spoke to a community on the verge of profound change. Despite prosperity, it was widely known that many of west Cornwall’s mines were facing the ultimate price of all extractive industries, being rapidly exhausted of copper ore as well as facing greater competition from sources overseas. Within decades Cornwall’s once globally dominant industry would face collapse and extinction, taking with it the rich histories and cultures of ancient mines and their surrounding communities. Already the Cornish miner was a global diasporic figure increasingly seeking a future for his skills and knowledge beyond Cornish, and British, shores, becoming the famous ‘Cousin Jack’ of hard rock mines stretching from the United States to Australasia. Cobbler’s own fate now become wrapped up in the changing character of a global Cornishness. It was reported by the Gazette that at the inquest on the body Stevens’s nickname had in fact been Cousin Jack Cobbler. Although this had not been mentioned as Cobbler’s full nickname in 1828. Some later commentators have subsequently drawn a connection between Stevens as ‘Jack Cobbler’ and the origins of the ‘Cousin Jack’ appellation given to emigrant Cornishmen. However, given the existence of other earlier origin stories for the term ‘Cousin Jack’ it appears more likely that the reappearance of Cobbler’s body, and the coincidence of his name, prompted a running together of these two traditions. Perhaps it just made sense to elide Steven’s everyday industrial accident with the increasingly global experience of emigrant Cornish identity.

Indeed, over the rest of the century Cobbler’s story continued to evolve with further apparent elaborations of the tale of this folk hero. By the turn of the century, it was believed that Cobbler had been married on the very same morning of his fatal mishap, and that when his body was rediscovered, his wife had already attended the funeral of her second husband. Again, these appear to be new elements of the story. Maybe this telling reflected the intensified insecurity of miners’ wives since the development of mechanical drilling in the few mines remaining in late-Victorian Cornwall, which greatly increased the risk of silicosis.

In later accounts one also finds the reopening of Pednandrea itself now attended by ‘many hundred assembled near the shaft’, who had gathered because ‘for all those years Jack Cobbler’s body had lain on the people.’ It is unclear how historically accurate these stories might be. However, the anxiety they represented perhaps reflected evolving concerns for the community’s body as much as with Cobbler’s. In the mid-Victorian period, Redruth’s persistent water supply problems had been partly met by using disused shafts as wells. Consequently, the Cornubian and Redruth Times later claimed that people ‘felt a personal interest in it because their drinking water flowed from the mine.’ Earlier variants of Cobbler’s story did not refer to this concern, but it was far from improbable. In 1858, the residents of Holmbush, near St Austell, had for many weeks been forced to drink water feared polluted by the remains of a miner lost down one of ‘nearly forty shafts without any fence or security whatever,’ that covered an abandoned mining sett and ‘through which many miners have to go at all hours of night to their labour at the neighbouring mines.’ Cobbler’s fall had entered folkloric memory but combined with new anxieties about pollution and uncanny hauntings of the community by the remains of past industry.

Perhaps the most spectacular transformation in later accounts of Cobbler’s fall were in the details of his rediscovery. The Manchester Courier carried a version of the tale in 1908 in which, with Pednandrea mine drained, a new generation of miners descended to the bottom and ‘as their candles lit up the dark scene, they saw a man standing upright in a corner, apparently alive. The perfect stillness of the watery element aided perhaps by its mineralised nature, had preserved the body almost as on the wedding day.’ However, as soon as an attempt to lift the body was made it ‘fell to pieces.’ This gothic horror retelling of Cobbler’s tale notably focuses not on the accident itself but on the body’s zombified return, in which, for a moment, the long dead Stevens is misrecognized as having returned to life.

While the reiteration of Cobbler’s story in print was an important part of the later survival of the story, by the 1890s it is apparent that Cobbler had also achieved something of a cultic status. It was, for example, reputed relics from Cobbler’s rediscovered corpse were in public circulation. One correspondent to the Cornubian and Redruth Times claimed in 1899 to have ‘a piece of the stocking which the fated man wore at the time he was found.’ And in the same year, Robert Tremayne wrote from Tasmania to report a fellow Cornishman he knew who claimed to possess a button personally taken from the dead man’s coat, perhaps an object regarded as connecting one ‘Cousin Jack’ to the supposed original. In any case, Cobbler’s artefacts were clearly believed to be circulating globally. His legacy even became materialized into the Cornish landscape itself. The reopened Pednandrea mine acquired a shaft named ‘Cobbler’s Shaft’, presumably the same as the site of his fall and rediscovery. This shaft was still being sunk deeper in 1891 when Pednandrea finally closed for the last time. Today it lies somewhere underneath a small car park in Redruth.

The story of Cobbler’s fall was clearly a meaningful and enduring one for the people of nineteenth-century Redruth. Its evolution as a modern folktale crossed a history spanning the heroic age of Cornish hard-rock mining through its decline and into the dispersal of the men and women who had worked Cornwall’s mines and formed its communities across the globe. But it is an open question what this story tells us from the perspective of an earthly humanities. In a moment in which more philosophical historians like Dipesh Chakrabarty are raising the question of what role might be left of humanist histories in the planetary age that some wish to designate the ‘Anthropocene’, what is to be done with stories like John Stevens’s? As Chakrabarty notes, today some 57 billion tons of earth are moved globally every year, a sum unimaginable to the Cornish miner of the 1820s.

Perhaps one way to look at John Stevens’s fate, and the role the story of Jack Cobbler came to play in Cornish culture and identity, is to allow it to alert us to the simultaneously enduring and fleeting legacies of industrial extraction. Cobbler was a victim of the rapacious ‘disembowelling’ of Cornwall’s land in the early nineteenth century, a moment of devastating environmental exploitation that, as Bernard Deacon shows in Industrial Celts, forged an enduring identity but not an enduring prosperity. Cobbler story found resonance in a community whose sense of self was tied to its deep history in extractive labour, but also increasingly sundered from it. Cobbler’s remarkable return perhaps partly worked as metonym for the ups-and-downs of life in an extractive economy, and perhaps also represented a deeper longing for return to an industrial past that by the early twentieth century was increasingly out of reach. Despite false dawns in the twentieth century, large scale industrial mining of tin and copper was never to return. 

In the same period, it seems that Cobbler’s story was largely forgotten. Reinterpretations of the tale in writing seem to cease after about 1908, though perhaps Cobbler enjoyed a longer after life in oral stories, or among the Cornish beyond Cornwall. I do not know. Nonetheless, in the age of what Arboleda calls the ‘planetary mine’, it is worth reflecting on the way in which, long after the mines are closed for the last time, it is their stories that may prove most enduring. Stories of horror and suffering, but also of courage, community, and endurance. Stories that may be forgotten and need to be re-excavated if we are to begin to imagine ways for the human world to live with its increasingly hollowed-out earthly foundations.